Remove Permanent Magic Marker from Clothes Using Whole Milk

My daughter came home yesterday with pink permanent magic marker stains on the sleeve of one of her favorite shirts.  This was not a cheap shirt.  My wife was not happy and my daughter was in tears because it was a Frozen themed shirt with Elsa and Anna on it, her favorite characters right now.  My first inclination was to start looking for a replacement because it seemed unlikely that this shirt would ever be OK to wear again.

Several family members and friends offered remedies that seemed completely farfetched, but given my reluctance to spend money on an article of clothing that we already purchased once, I decided it was worth at least giving them a try.

The option that was least likely to work, in my opinion was to soak the shirt in milk, but as it turns out, it was the solution that kept me from having to go out shopping for Frozen shirts.

We took a cereal bowl, which has seen its fair share of milk and filled it almost completely full with whole milk straight from the refrigerator.  There were pink stains around the cuff and also higher on the sleeve, but we decided to start small and just soak the first two or three inches of the sleeve and see what happened.  To our surprise, within minutes, the milk had already started turning a faint shade of pink.  We let the whole arrangement sit overnight.

The next morning, my wife checked on the shirt and noticed that the bowl of milk was almost empty.  We don't own a cat. so it seems that the shirt was rather thirsty and soaked the milk up slowly.  Fortunately, we positioned the shirt and bowl in the center of the counter so that it didn't get too heavy and fall off the side pulling the bowl with it.

Amazingly, the permanent marker stains were about 95% gone.  There was a slight mark left, but it so faint, it was almost unnoticeable.  The worst stains had completely disappeared.  Of course, the next step was to immediately wash the shirt so that my daughter didn't smell like sour milk the next day at school.  So today, I learned an important lesson: If you have a bad stain and nothing else will clean it, try whole milk.  You may be as pleasantly surprised as we were.

Practicing Good Mobile Phone Etiquette

Now that technology has provided us with a means to stay in touch with our family and friends from virtually any populated area on the planet, certain rules or etiquette are being blatantly ignored.  Let’s reverse this trend.

Most people who own mobile phones are not keen on the idea of turning off their phones or leaving them behind in any circumstance.  Business professionals, in both blue collar and white collar specialties, carry mobile phones.  Elderly people know how to text, chat, surf, and speak wirelessly to their grand kids, who also carry mobile phones to school with them.  Rich people carry phones.  Poor people carry phones.  The President of the USA is going to start carrying a mobile phone.  Smart people carry phones.  Dumb people… well, you get the point!  Everybody’s got one!

The problem is that many of these people fail to analyze the situation they're in and wind up in an awkward moment where they are being very obnoxious to the people around them.  For example, movie theaters and libraries are not ideal places for ringing phone noises and elaborate ring tones.  That’s extremely rude and disruptive.  Most mobile phones have a silent or vibrate option standard. Make it a habit to either switch your phone to silent before you enter one of these areas, or just leave your phone silenced all the time and get used to living with it that way.  Also, the microphones on mobile phones are fairly efficient.  If you think you have to yell at your phone for the person on the other end to hear, you should not have answered.

Another problem area is in the retail environment on both sides of the sales counter.  I have witnessed sales associates who have spent the entire time it takes to complete my transaction talking on the phone.  I have waited through countless conversations as the people ahead of me in line focus 5% of their attention towards the transaction at hand and 95% towards hearing some juicy gossip. Make it a personal rule to hang up your mobile phones while participating in any transaction.  People will appreciate it.

Not everyone is a great driver.  Plaster a mobile phone to the side of their head and their skill level drastically reduces.  If you can avoid talking on the phone while driving, please do so.  If you absolutely cannot miss the call, at least use a hands-free device.  Whatever you do, do not EVER text and drive  That’s incredibly stupid and it's illegal!!

Starting a Blog for Your Baby

As a new parent, it’s not always easy to find time to record a baby’s early life in their baby book.  Create a blog for your baby to help you to complete the missing information in their baby book later and give them an interactive window into their early childhood as an adult.

Choose a blogging website and sign up for a free membership.  There are many blogs to choose from.  Find a blog that is easy to use and one with enough features to suite your tastes.  Consider making the blog private and only sharing it with your spouse.  Keep the whole project a secret from your child until they are much older.  It will be a sweet and unexpected surprise for your son or daughter to receive access to so much information about their childhood.  Verify that you are able to download backups of the blog to your computer and do so frequently.

Take lots of digital photographs of your baby.  A mobile phone with a built-in camera is extremely handy for this.  Remember that pictures taken with a camera phone will typically be low resolution and perfect for displaying on the blog, but will not make good printed photographs.  If you wish to print many of the pictures that you take of your baby, buy a decent digital camera and keep it close by at all times.  If you take mostly high resolution photos of your baby, use a photo editing program to make lower resolution copies to post to the blog because they will take up far less space and load faster in your web browser.

Post interesting and detailed blog entries every day.  Write as though you are speaking to your child directly.  Don’t write, “Ate applesauce for the first time today.”  Make the post interesting and discuss things that were happening, not just with your child, but also with family members and friends whom they will be able to relate to later in life.  Don’t share any negative or personal feelings about anyone and don’t talk about your problems or worries.  Keep the experience positive and upbeat.  You can also add brief clips of current events, but remember not to just link to other web sites.  Most websites change constantly, so you’ll want to make snapshots of pages or find files that you can save on the blog or link to.  PDF files are a great format to use for capturing pictures and text in a single document because they display the same way, no matter which browser you use to view the file.

Upload short, compressed video files or sound clips to the blog.  This will require additional equipment, like a digital video camera and the appropriate editing software, but the results are well-worth the investment.  Your child will one day have the ability to watch their first steps or hear their first words by simply logging into the blog, which will be far more interactive than their baby book could ever be.